Facebook: 10 Reasons to Use It for Business

SAVE THE DATE: Facebook Business Coach, Mari Smith, is our guest on a teleseminar about how to grow your business with Facebook...Monday, March 10 @ 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Details and registration here.

10 Reasons to Use Facebook for Business
by Mari Smith

Social networking websites, especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its array of powerful features.

Here are ten reasons to be active on Facebook:

1.    Meet your peers. Facebook is not just for college kids anymore. Members are typically older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more white collar users.

2.    Find business contacts. With more than 65 million active users, and predicted to be 200 million by the end of 2008, not only are your friends  on Facebook, so are your prospects, your customers, your JV partners… and, of course, your competitors. You need to be on too.

3.    Instant gate opener. Facebook members are open to connecting. You can easily begin a dialog with highly successful-even famous-people who were previously otherwise unreachable.

4.    Build relationships. By engaging in conversations with your prospects and customers, you can better adapt your marketing and business services to meet their needs.

5.    Raise visibility. By consistently showing up, posting relevant information, and being a thought leader, you can increase visibility and credibility as an expert in your area.

6.    Develop your personal brand. The lines between business and personal have become blurred. You can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you wish, allowing you to personalize your brand.

7.    Target your niche. Users volunteer vast amounts of information about themselves that you can readily access. These kinds of demographics, psychographics, and technographics would previously have cost fortunes to access. Author, John Battelle, calls Facebook a "database of intentions."

8.    Get rapid top Google placement. Create a Page for your business and ''push" information to your "fans." Pages (for business) and Profiles (for personal) are indexed for optimal search engine positioning. Facebook has a page rank of #7 according to Alexa.

9.    Place targeted ads. With Facebook Social Ads, you can test out extremely targeted advertising for minimal cost.

10.    No cost marketing. Aside from paid ads, Facebook is totally free to use and with regular activity you'll end up with more traffic, more subscribers, and more paying clients.

Mari Smith is a Relationship Specialist, Internet Marketing Consultant and Facebook Business Coach. She offers a free introductory class for professionals on how to use Facebook for strategic business growth at: FacebookFortunes. Class materials include PDF guides, how-to videos, discussion forum, and dozens of interviews with successful active Facebook members.

Comments

[Shama Hyder]

Denise,

Facebook is also a great place to network and set yourself as the expert in a given industry.

[Alan]

Great post. Just last week we started to build a Facebook strategy at Corky and Company. It's all about relationship building before starting the brand building. There are a lot of great tools like, profiles, groups, pages, events etc. Good luck with the teleseminar. We bought a $19 ebook that was very helpful, 24 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook. Its not my book so this isn't a product plug!

[Chris Shallow]

IMHO, whether you should use Facebook all depends on your target audience. If I was looking to attract potential students for our university, yes, I'd look at it (and some other social media) very seriously but as part of an integrated marketing campaign. AND be very careful with your approach: be fun, informative, give something of value (you MUST know your target's psycho-demographics). If my target audience was older, business people I would use LinkedIn (that's where all my business contacts are). Perhaps to reach creatives, Facebook would be better?

[Rosalind Sedacca, CCT]

Great feedback, Mari. You're such a natural with this and I can see how well it's paying off! Thanks for motivating me to pay more attention to Facebook and other social media. Glad to see that it really works.

Best regards,
Rosalind

[Denise aka The Blog Squad]

In response to Chris' comment, I've found that there are a lot of professionals using FB now. It's not just for college students anymore. Facebook also enables a more personal conversation than LinkedIn, IMHO.

[Mari Smith]

@Shama - yes! I totally agree. Every one of us has the opportunity to carve out our own place on Facebook. I'm not much of a believer in competition - there's only one you! :) The more you show up, consistently & transparently (relatively), the more top-of-mind-awareness you'll have as the go-to person in your industry.

@Chris - with all due respect, I think your perception of the demographics, psychographics & technographics on Facebook may be about 12 months out of date. :) Facebook has established itself as a powerful place to connect with fellow professionals, white collar workers, age 25+. And, as Denise says, Facebook is more conducive to realtime conversation. (Here's one of the keys: you must train yourself to ignore 95% of the 'visual noise'!) I hope you're able to join the call on Monday!

[Chris Shallow]

Whilst I take your points Denise and Mari, I still think that Facebook is not automatically the best place to go. As I wrote it all depends on your target audience. For younger people (as you write, 25+), sure but for older, more senior people? I would still go for LinkedIn if I wanted to reach top managers and directors in many industries, e.g. IT. As I wrote that is where all my business friends are whilst my students are in Facebook. After graduation they tend to drift away from Facebook (and frantically delete anything that a potential employer wouldn't want to see) and some are appearing, already, in LinkedIn. In short, it's 'horses for courses'. Don't get too obsessed with Facebook. Remember Friendster and SixDegrees? Where are they now? What's 'IN' with one generation may well not be with the next -- like jeans' brands! There are competitors too, e.g. Bebo is very popular in the UK and Xing is also very popular with professionals, particularly in the German speaking world. Some of my business contacts can be found in Xing, so I'm there, too.

[joy]

Awesome! It's one way, marketing and advertising for free.. you get to meet a lot of entrepreneurs online with Facebook. Goodluck!!

[Jeanne May]

I've been using facebook on an off for a few months... at first I got quite distracted with lots of different applications and requests from different sources. I found it very time consuming -- that is until I set up clear time limits for me. It is easy to get sidetracked and find that many hours have gone by... but once I got into a routine of what I needed to do that was related to my work and my business, I've found it to be a useful resource.
Looking forward to Monday
Jeanne

[Boris Mahovac R.G.D.]

Here's another great article on a related subject: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2007/07/ten-ways-to-use.html

I am looking forward to tonight's call.